Steven Soderbergh's Che Guevara epic tops the list and there are new films by Wim Wenders, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Charlie Kaufman, Paulo Sorrentino, Pablo Trapero, Lucrecia Martel, Jia Zhangke, Atom Egoyan, Woody Allen and Clint Eastwood. Spielberg's new Indiana Jones film will show out of competition. Brillante Mendoza's Serbis is the first Filipino film to be shown at Cannes for 25 years. I can feel my nerdy-festival-Pavlovian saliva glands starting to kick in. What's going to be good? What's going to be great? One of the obvious attractions, the star turns? Or something that we've never heard of?

Worryingly, this is going to be my 10th Cannes: in what seems like the blink of an eye, I have reached double figures. Apparently, the festival dishes out "long service" medals to people who are serious long-haulers, people with two or three times my attendance figures, and they line up to be given these by the festival's director Gilles Jacob, like veterans of the first world war in front of the Cenotaph. I haven't quite got to that stage yet, but I have an uncomfortable feeling that it will arrive quicker than I think. For the present, though, I feel I have earned the right to indulge one of the most annoying affectations of the UK Cannes journalists: pronouncing the word "Majestic" in "Hotel Majestic" as if it is a French word, but in a completely English accent, as in (deadpan English accent) "Er, yeah, apparently Benicio Del Toro's staying at the Mah-jeh-steek." Ouch.

Anyway, the first duty is to report the glorious presence, or shaming absence, of British films in Cannes. There is nothing in competition this year, but Terence Davies's new film Of Time and the City is to be presented as a special screening. Shane Danielsen has already blogged on this site about the mixed emotions this project will evoke in the hearts of Davies admirers.

This is a documentary about Liverpool, and Davies has been given a grant of £250,000 to make it from the Digital Departures scheme, partly run by the UK Film Council and the BBC. Well done them for giving a hand to Davies, but how appalling that this great film-maker has not had more help over the years than this really pretty modest contribution. Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, Peter Greenaway all thrive, and yet Davies's projects have been stalled for lack of funding. Perhaps his appearance at Cannes will trigger a much-needed renaissance.

The big story of Cannes this year, at first glance, is Steven Soderbergh's four-hour movie Che -- which is playing despite earlier fears that he had missed the deadline with it -- and is composed of two separately conceived films, The Argentine and Guerrilla. This isn't the first time Che has been in Cannes: Walter Salles's The Motorcycle Diaries in 2004 featured Gael García Bernal as the young Guevara. (Walter Salles also has a feature in competition this year - Linha De Passe, about four brothers fixing on getting out of their São Paulo ghetto.)

The first half of Soderbergh's epic, The Argentine, picks up after his younger "Motorcycle" era and shows his landfall with Castro and the troops in Cuba and the subsequent toppling of Batista. The second movie shows his sensational arrival in New York in 1964 to speak at the United Nations, and continues, reportedly, to his killing in the Bolivian jungle. As ever with Che films, one is hoping that someone will be playing Guardian journalist Richard Gott, who identified Che's body, just before it was laid out in the iconic "Christ" picture.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan is the Turkish director that the Cannes festival organisers have nurtured as a pre-eminent artist of world cinema and he has repaid them with two superb films at the Festival: Distant and Climates. His latest film is called Three Monkeys, and it will be a hot ticket. If I had to bet money at this stage on the Palme d'Or, on a sheer whim and a hunch, it would be on Ceylan.

The remarkably prolific Clint Eastwood is another big favourite on the Croisette, and his appearance at the traditional post-film press conference usually triggers Beatlemania scenes, and the now equally traditional, but horribly uncool spectacle of reporters crowding down the front for the great man's autograph. His film, Changeling, is a period movie about the kidnapping of a son who is then reunited with his mother -- played by Angelina Jolie. A big red carpet event, this one.

The Belgian film-makers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne will be gunning for their third Palme d'Or with Le Silence De Lorna, and it has a fascinating premise, vaguely reminiscent of Henry James's The Wings of the Dove. A young Albanian woman, desperate for a better life in Europe, enters into a marriage of convenience with a Belgian drug addict. If he dies of an overdose -- which is a distinct probability -- she will have absolute freedom. The husband himself however, has a yearning, albeit weak-willed, to live. How far should his wife exert herself to prevent him OD-ing?

Paulo Sorrentino is another Cannes festival favourite with films like The Consequences Of Love and The Family Friend. His latest, Il Divo, is a change of direction; it is a portrait of the legendary and long-lived Italian politician Giulio Andreotti, the 88-year-old former prime minister, senator-for-life and a man tried for and acquitted of Mafia links and the murder of an Italian journalist. Andreotti will be played by the excellent Toni Servillo, the star of The Consequences of Love.

La Mujer Sin Cabeza, or The Woman Who Lost Her Head, is a film from a woman who is at the arrowhead of the new Argentinian wave: Lucrecia Martel. (Martel is the only woman director in the competition.) It is reportedly about a woman who runs over a dog, triggering a chain of disturbing events: knowing Martel's genius for homing in on still, quiet moments, this can hardly be a thriller in the conventional sense -- or can it?

The other Argentinian star is Pablo Trapero, whose film is a tough drama set in a women's prison called Leonera. The original Spanish-language trailer is online here.

As far as the French contingent goes, festivalgoers may feel a twinge of disappointment that Agnes Jaoui's new film Parlez-Moi De La Pluie has not been selected. Neither has Michel Houellebecq's La Possibilité D'une Île. Both may still be included in the Un Certain Regard sidebar. But Arnaud Desplechin's Un Conte De Noel, starring Catherine Deneuve and Mathieu Amalric, has to be interesting.

The most purely sexy entry is probably Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman as a theatre director struggling to create a life-size replica of New York inside a vast warehouse for a radical new theatre project. Could this be the hit of Cannes, or will the Kaufman bubble burst just before his arrival? That gigantic Palais screen has a habit of magnifying the flops as well as the triumphs.

All this, and we still haven't exhausted the competition possibilities, nor have we got stuck into the selections for Un Certain Regard, Director's Fortnight or Critic's Week. I can't wait...